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If there was any doubt about the virulence of colonial machismo or its inoculation in U.S.-American white, supremacist masculinity, one need only look at how recent murders rely on three of its most recognizable tropes – the hunter, the gunsman, the police – that have turned decidedly murderous and terroristic against animals, women, kids, and people of color, particularly African Americans.

To say there is an epidemic of toxic masculinity in U.S.A, the world’s leading gun phallocracy, is to say the least. Week after week, we read about police officers as the lawless hitmen of Order (Ray Tensing, Brian Encinia, Darren Wilson et al), the rampage killer (Dylann Roof, John Russell Houser), and the animal torturer and killer (Walter Palmer). These men are getting their fifteen minutes of shame as they are caught in flagrante delicto but their capture or release only begins to tell many stories yet untold. The news isn’t so much that these murders are happening or would continue to happen. It isn’t even that the system is corrupt. We already know that. What is striking about their recent social media exposé is the sense of public outrage at discovering them, and learning how widespread they are.

That is to say, while the willful and anonymous execution of disposable lives is an everyday occurrence by the police state, racial capitalism and colonial violence, a history of the present well documented by thinkers and activists, bodycam, dashcam and videocam recordings of a few incidents are helping to generate a collective consternation:

“We didn’t know, actually didn’t want to know, just how bad it is but here is murder staring at our faces.”

To murder is to end another’s life or the conditions of possibility for life. It is to force the other to die, whether instantly or slowly and unbearably, by force or self-destruction, and then to perversely care that that death is justified in rational, economic or procedural terms. It is to disregard life itself and to strip away everything that constitutes a person’s humanity. For those whose lives are severely disenfranchised by systemic racism, compulsory heterosexuality, and cisgender privilege, historic and quotidian versions of this murder are all too common.

But to see through the eyes of the dead, the eyes of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland and Sam Dubose, is to see these murders (literally and figuratively) as simultaneously uncontrollable and targeted.

It is to see the workings of a toxic, supremacist white masculinity as ordinary and terrifying, self-centered and godlike in complex, cowardly and frightful in constitution. There is a silver lining even in this extreme violence. That these murderers would now grab the headlines as murderers indicates that the seemingly unimpeachable white masculinist complex is finally losing its absolute legitimacy, and subject to public scrutiny and judgment.

The much bigger problem about the gun phallocracy is the internalization of colonial machismo in U.S.-American psychic, institutional, regulatory and relational structures. There is more to do than catching or shaming a few of its murderers – U.S. gun violence is the worst in the world.

The chart above doesn’t include suicides with firearms that are twice as likely to happen than homicides. According to researchers at Harvard University and Stanford University, there is a correlation between gun availability, right-to-carry gun laws and firearm homicide. It is as simple as that:

more guns = more violent crimes = more homicide

Even though common sense gun laws significantly lower self-inflicted as well as homicidal violence, such studies advocating evidence-based gun safety are often successfully discredited by the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association. Much of this has to do with money, money that is also going into the militarization of the police as an apparatus of the neoliberal state. This includes university campus police units that are increasingly outfitted with the same militarized gear such as those at the University of California campuses during the crackdown against student protestors in 2011.

In particular, the pepper spray cop at UC Davis who casually assaulted student Occupy protestors became emblematic of cavalier, campus corporatization rising in tandem with a militarized police presence that is not only out of line but rewarded for their transgressions. For instance, the aforementioned cop was awarded $38,000 for the “emotional suffering” and “psychological injuries” he endured for pulling the trigger of his pepper spray can on 21 students. His notoriety was so widespread that memes ridiculing him and the morally bankrupt decision of the court’s disability settlement saturated the internet.

In spite of the public outcry, there is little reform in the police force or cutback from its brutal militarization. One could say that the unmitigated violation of students and their rights by the militarized cops on the campuses of California in 2011 abetted University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing’s violent extraction of Sam Dubose’s civil and human rights with a fatal gunshot in 2015. Both cops casually or involuntarily clicked on the triggers provided to them by the neoliberal state but it took four years and hundreds of other violations before any misbehaving cop was even deemed potentially criminal.

Meanwhile, civilian gun stock per capita has roughly doubled since 1968, from one gun per every two persons to one gun per person. The proliferation of guns has made the industry a powerful, profiteering bloc that is worth 31.8 billion dollars in 2012. Its initiads have more than the defense of the Second Amendment in mind when they do gun talk. The mean salary of a gun worker is $140k/annum (compare that with university pepper spray cop’s 120k/annum salary, which is well above what most professors make). But on the topic of money, what does gun violence really cost?

The human toll and direct and indirect costs of gun violence are estimated to be 229 billion dollars.

It does not even make economic sense to support the gun industry considering its costs. As the above video shows, this negative economic burden exceeds even Apple’s worldwide revenue in 2012. Who, one might ask, are the benefactors of this gun regime?

The entitlement and privatization of gun rights have reached such a point of phallocratic idiocy that cops and vigilantes like George Zimmerman are able to turn their guns at anyone they deem unlawful, and then claim self-defense or right-to-carry guns as their bullet-proof mantra. Everyone is sick of this morally bankrupt rhetoric. No student and kid should have a gun pointed at them, and no one should be walking in fear of cowardly men possessed by gun machismo. To police the police, counter-movements on the street like Copwatch are stepping up. Others are using social media as a kinetic platform to create swift public justice. While these interventions are effective in the performance of public outrage, so much so that Walter Palmer has gone into hiding, the righteous thrill of digital vigilantism has its limits. Predictably, the gun phallocracy’s pullback against the public’s pushback has rendered Palmer a sympathetic figure who has to “endure [the] latest onslaught from the social media mob.” The hunter, as many observe, has become “the hunted.”

The indistinguishable “social media mob” vis-à-vis the singular Walter Palmer only reinscribes the narrative of the white man as exceptional and blameless, which Palmer himself tried to invoke in a statement released by a PR firm he hired. (All PR firms have since distanced themselves from this case.) His defense is a form of colonial oblivion or high delusion – he has “legal” paperwork obtained with an expensive bribe ($50,000), he is unaware that Cecil is important, and besides it is all just game in the Safari. His fellow Great White Hunters have come to his defense saying the man is in fact protecting and preserving the “trophy” species: “Nobody is going to spend $50,000 to $75,000 on a photographic safari. All the parks in Zimbabwe are run on hunting dollars.”

But why won’t the rich use their wealth to fund research and sustainability projects rather than posing with their $50k exotic kills in Africa? The manner of Cecil’s killing provides some answers. Palmer shot the animal with a crossbow and tortured it for 40 hours before shooting, beheading and skinning it. He also tried to hide the GPS collar that a team of researchers from Oxford University had attached to Cecil, effectively destroying years of research and a local tourist attraction. A Zimbabwean law professor based in the UK notes that Palmer is part of a “lucrative hunting industry,” a “horrible blood industry” that operates like a “cartel” and “Mafioso.”

Cecil the lion may be anthropormophised and even Disneyfied. But “the mob” is responding to the vileness of a cavalier machismo so ordinary and godlike, so violent in its method of killing and capitalist entitlement that there is little distinction between the hunters’s “We pay to kill” and the police officers’s “We get paid to kill.”

These kills are allegories of colonial violence in the transnational present.

To go after Palmer as a lone ranger is therefore to miss how the colonial hunting of African animals is part of a triumvirate of self- and system-justifying U.S. hunters, mass killers and police on the prowl for blood. These men are duly weaponized and ever ready to boost their frightened manhoods by hunting, hurting and hitting. For who would kill for sport, be triggered by imagined racial assault, and assert the law to shore up the schizophrenia of this unholy trinity? Who else but those threatened by the disappearance of their own relevance and entitlement, their bitterness at the myriad failures of compulsory heterosexuality, and structural inequities biting them back in their asses?

No law will change colonial machismo or the imperial white, male ego purchased with blood. For every Palmer, Roof and Tensing caught in the act, many others like them will continue to roam the streets under the radar. What, then, is to be done? Do we need more bodycams, more surveillance, and even more overwhelming evidence of excessive force to indict the bad apples of the state apparatus? Do we need more laws that are enforced by the lawless? Or do we need to dismantle the gun phallocracy by incinerating those damn guns and all macho b.s?

*

“Why are you trying to make sense with crooks?”my dad asked me as the rogue movers from New Jersey held my things in hostage, and demanded twice, three times and finally quadruple the price of the original quote. Each phone call from the company sent me to the nearest town on my drive to Michigan where I had to wire them the money through Western Union. A few weeks later, as they dropped off my things, much of them broken, the movers acted like nothing bad had happened. I kicked myself for going with the lowest bidder but money was tight and the contract seemed binding. There was apparently no legal recourse because the move crossed several state lines, and all I could do was file a complaint with Better Business Bureau and write a really bad Yelp review. As with all good scams, the moving company staged such a flawless execution that fooled even my ex-boyfriend, an attorney in New York City who negotiated on my behalf only to turn on me for not paying them enough as if their quote was my fault. His indictment – “how could you? why didn’t you pay them more” – reverberated in my ear with resonances of our recent break-up.

Months later, an exposé news team did a segment on moving scams and shamed this rogue company on national television. It was unreal to see the company on TV. I felt vindicated though not much better. I was reminded of being attached to broken things. Besides, the corrective justice focused on one company out of thousands that used predatory and extortionist practices. For instance, over 8500 complaints were filed in 2012, and many more hoaxes go unreported. What does it take for institutions to take action? What the news segment did was to confirm my account all along but the power of televisual validation turned the tide against the rogue mover, which closed down. A year later, it morphed into another company.

Are the recent exposés of U.S.-American policing doing something similar or different? Are the cams making visible what has been concealed or are we simply refusing to see the actuality of lived violations?

The eyes of Sam Dubose, and the dash cam of the Dallas police.

Who’s looking – the eyes of the dead or the colonial gaze?

Is the camera a form of deterrent or deferment of justice? Is it an imagined corrective for bad behavior with no transformative effect on the culture of policing? As much as we think we know what we see, the Rodney King video in 1991 indicates that a visual economy of proof does not get at the “truth” of the matter. Like documentaries, surveillance cameras tend to promote empathetic responses about the verisimilitude of representation. They assume the seamless merging of the viewer and the viewed, or the character and the subject. We could understand this through Brecht’s account of the street scene, a cornerstone of epic theater. The demonstrator in the street scene is the one who “acts the behavior of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident.” But rather than being stuck in the “he did that, he said that” element of performance, the charge is to generate consciousness about difference by demonstrating through performative documentation, the “social function of the whole apparatus.”

As a window to the street scene of policing, the cam’s realistic frame is entrapped in the engendering of illusion, and its interlocutors have used its recordings as a matter of representation, or the truth, rather than as a resource for a direct changeover from representation to commentary. What the camera is demonstrating is the method of murderous policing coming undone because its agents are unable to contain the virulence of the racist and misogynist state. They are acting on its deadly colonial machismo as if its labile affects are beyond control. And they are out of control.

In the latest murder case, University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing moved from monotonous flatness one moment to compulsive rage the next before blowing the face off Sam Dubose with one shot. Dubose is the 534th person shot dead by the police in the U.S. this year. Tensing joins a long line of angry white men who “lost their temper” at being disobeyed or disrespected, and then immediately pulled out their guns for self-protection.

If ever there was a need for trigger warning, this is it.

It does not take much for these guys to snap. While they may seem “senseless and asinine,” the pathology of pride and fear, panic and rage is the racial complex of colonial machismo trying to suppress its own terror by shooting away every schizophrenic episode involving an imagined, unarmed black assailant looming large like a criminal, a monster, a wild man. This paranoia and its hallucinogenic references have a long, colonial history, and they are deep symptoms of colonial guilt. As Alfred Métraux notes in his classic study, Haitian Voodoo:

“Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power often takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the occult powers which he imputed to him. And the greater the subjugation of the Black, the more he inspired fear; the ubiquitous fear which shows in the records of the period and which solidified in the obsessions with poison, which throughout the eighteenth century, was the cause of so many atrocities.” (New York: Schocken, 1972), p15.

The U.S. obsession with guns in the twenty first century substitutes for the colonial obsession with poison of the eighteenth century, and both are tied to the “anxiety… of those who abuse power.” Each murder in the U.S. gun phallocracy continues the atrocities of colonial violence. The falsehoods and fabrications of the police in their reports of murder echo the “imaginary terrors and demented obsessions” of the slave master. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, for instance, characterized Michael Brown as a “demon,” and said he “felt like a five-year-old holding Hulk Hogan” even though both men were 6 ft 4. Perhaps Wilson is articulating a nation’s anxiety at being coddled by a black President or perhaps he is so shaken by the broken spell of colonial machismo that he has to murder to make the spell work again. Either way, the toxicity of white, supremacist masculinity has become an extremely dangerous contagion, and is in desperate need of medical, social and rehabilitative treatment.

“Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity”

May the ghosts of the dead rise up to forever haunt all deadly white man, the hunter, the gunsman, the police, and their imitators with their smoking guns in hand every minute of their waking days.

5 Responses to “Trigger Warning: Toxic Masculinity in the U.S. Gun Phallocracy By Eng-Beng Lim”

Why this particular title picture showed up from his article (as seen join FB) is a bit of a mystery as @Eng-Beng Lim’s commentary of white male violence—really tethered to colonial England and “The British Empire,” was much more broad. The glaring USA example and inequity we now have is law enforcement attitudes towards Black men, in particular, people of color—a bit more broad, and more generally, women. We must call it what it is and stop dancing around the data of who is the aggressor, who is the instigator, who acts as judge and jury, and who has effectively acted above the law he establishes.
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Lim’s article blows me away as to how insightful his assessment is! I must attribute it to his background, as an educator, by birthright, or a combination of both, that allows him to view the overall putrid situation, of unarmed murders…, of bravado…, and correctly imply that America is truly on of many industrious countries on this planet (albeit new, less than 300 years), and call the country on its patriarchal machismo and arrogance that our political leaders attempt to assert, sometimes blindly, that we have functioning democracy—the best in the world.
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The article went beyond stringing together deplorable current events. Lim opened the never-touched discussion of social and psychological entitlement. Bully for Lim: for providing such a rich analysis. Insightful and effect critical thinking is what I see here. As I read the article, the plethora of other law enforcement victims, with the latter shots of Trump Jr and the dentist—all hovering their safari kills, painted a better picture for the content of his piece.